Eleven days of weather, in numbers

We log the weather every departure — 08:00, 13:00 and 20:00, on paper, in a book that lives in a dry bag. Nine seasons of it now. People ask what a Svalbard expedition is actually like day to day, and the honest answer is more usefully given as a table than as an adjective.

This is the third departure of 2026, 4 to 14 July, six paddlers and two guides.

The log

Day	Place	Wind 08:00	Sea	Paddled	On the water
3	Hornsund mouth	4 m/s NW	Slight	18 km	5h 10m
4	Burgerbukta	3 m/s var	Calm	14 km	4h 40m
5	Burgerbukta	12 m/s N	Rough	0 km	—
6	Brepollen	5 m/s NE	Slight	21 km	6h 20m
7	Brepollen	6 m/s NE	Slight	16 km	5h 00m
8	Brepollen	14 m/s NE	Rough	0 km	—
9	Gåshamna	4 m/s SE	Calm	23 km	6h 45m
10	Gåshamna	7 m/s SE	Moderate	11 km	3h 30m
11	Pickup	9 m/s S	Moderate	0 km	—

Water temperature ran between 2.4°C and 4.1°C, measured at the surface beside the kayaks. Air temperature at 08:00 never went above 7°C and never below −1°C.

What the two blown-out days were like

Day five and day eight, both at over 12 m/s, both of them entirely in and around camp. This is the part people do not picture. You are not paddling, you are not walking anywhere useful, and the day is spent in a tent, on a bear watch rota, or sitting in the lee of a rock with a thermos watching a glacier front two kilometres away do nothing very slowly.

The bear

Day seven, 03:40, on Kari’s watch, at roughly six hundred metres on the far side of the beach, moving north and away without ever looking at the camp. Logged, reported to the Sysselmester the following week with the position, and that was the whole event. We did not break camp. Nobody in the tents knew until breakfast and two people were visibly annoyed about that, which is fair and is also not going to change.

What I would change

We camped on the north side of Brepollen on days six to eight and the NE wind on day eight came straight into the site. There is a better beach a kilometre west that I have used before and did not choose because the landing is worse at low water. I will take the worse landing next time.